The traditional version uses white chicken breast meat, preferably freshly slaughtered capon. The meat is softened by boiling and separated into very fine fibers or rillettes. Modern recipes often pound the meat into a fine powder instead. The meat is mixed with milk, sugar, cracked rice and/or other thickeners, and often some sort of flavoring such as cinnamon. The result is a thick pudding often shaped for presentation.

The dish is more or less identical to the medieval "white dish", blancmange that was common in the upper-class cuisine of Europe.[1][2]

^Coe (1994), pg. 231; "Before his arrival in Mexico City he was entertained with ... some manjar blanco [blanc manger] ... a dish served in Turkey today as a dessert and called tavuk gögsü."

^Humes (2009); "In the fourteenth century, Western Europe couldn't get enough of tavuk göğsü. Known in England as blanc-manger, or 'white dish', the pallid chicken pudding appears in English, Italian, and German cookbooks of the period."